


Relativity

by stella_bella



Category: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Post Film
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 12:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1226800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stella_bella/pseuds/stella_bella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam adjusts to life in Tangiers, and Eve adjusts to living with Adam again after so many years.  Can be read as a sequel to "Entanglement", but it's not necessary to have read that one first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Relativity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UniversesVisiting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniversesVisiting/gifts).



Time moves slowly in Tangiers.

The city itself is old; layers of stone and brick shaped by the steady wash of time as much as by chisels and intent. Meandering alleyways open suddenly into sun-drenched courtyards, and soaring minarets keep watch over laundry hung dancing on a line. Thousands of years have passed inside these bleached walls; millions of lives have carried themselves over the cobblestone streets and through the slender archways.

In some places, the stone stairs are hollowed in the middle, worn down by the passage of years and so many heedless people.

Adam can sympathise.

\---

He awakens in the darkness, cut by a faint glow from the streetlights outside. The ceiling fans spins above, too slowly to stir the heat that drapes itself throughout the room like a living thing.

Eve is sleeping, curled on her side. He moves to rest a hand on her shoulder, stir her awake with a touch and a thought, but at the last second, he stills.

Music from some passing radio drifts in around the window coverings, and Adam turns his head. Arabic. It’s been a while since he’s lived where it’s spoken with regularity, and he rolls the words around in his mind, lets them settle. With all of the knowledge they keep, it’s less like a computer and more like a card catalog; things have to be looked for, dusted off, carried blinking into the light.

He remembers, and as the song fades in the distance, he wonders who wrote it, who sang the words, so full of sorrow and heartache that it’s almost as if they knew; but of course they didn’t, they can’t. They don’t live nearly long enough.

\---

Eve is beautiful like this, arched pale and shining against the rich tones of the bed coverings. Adam kisses the inside of her thigh, and she trembles.

Her skin tastes of parchment, sweetly dusty, and on it he writes his songs to her, traces the letters with his fingers and lips.

She shivers, and pulls him closer, and his hands cradle her hips. She whispers words in Arabic, in French and English and Greek, but when she falls she only has breath left for his name.

\---

They sit on a pier, long after sunset. Eve slips off her shoes, dangles narrow white feet over the water below.

“I used to come here with Christopher.”

Adam looks over at her.

“We would sit, and talk, and he’d tell me all about the new play he was writing.”

The breeze stirs her hair, strands like spider web crossing her pale face. She smiles, softly, sadly; her eyes on the boats but not seeing them.

“I know it’s silly, but I miss him terribly sometimes. He wouldn’t want me to miss him; in fact, I know he’d hate it, but when you spend so long with someone, it’s hard not to just expect they’ll be there.”

Adam tucks the hair behind her ear, letting his fingers curl around her neck. She sighs, and leans into the touch, and the world goes on around them.

The falling tide moves soundlessly below, thick and black like molasses, and swallows the light.

\---

Eve stays up past dawn, a dim yellow light burning on the desk. She still prefers to do her translations in fountain pen; Adam loves that about her, like he loves her calligraphy, the thick, sensual strokes of ink against the bone-white parchment.

It’s been a long time since she translated Latin to Arabic, and the sentences unspool slowly at first, then faster and faster, and her pen sings.

Adam watches from the bed, head in his hand and eyes glittering in the half-light. She is lit like a figure in a tableau, unchanging, and this could be in Rome or Paris or Madrid, in any of lives they have borrowed.

He falls asleep on the left side of the bed, hand outstretched.

\---

Eve visits a café, just minutes from closing. There’s a man in the back with blank eyes and a small case at his feet.

She sits, nodding a greeting, and the ivory silk she wears settles with a whisper. She does not remove her gloves.

The man takes the money, limp from the heat and folded over carefully; he does not count it. He toasts her with his half-drunk tea, ironically, perhaps, but his eyes are an empty corridor and she cannot see what is not there. When he sets the cup on the saucer, he rises to leave. The case stays behind.

Eve reaches for the teacup, turning it gently. Nearly sixty years old, or thereabouts; the china is worn thin, and when she holds it up to the light, it glows from within.

She leaves with the case, ignoring the voices that call to her from doorways and alleys, the voices that seduce, that promise sweet, fleeting oblivion, for a price. Her price is too high, and she clasps the case tighter. It’s late, and she is cold.

\---

Adam drinks, lets the cordial glass roll to a stop on the carpet as he falls back onto the floor, unheeding of the books piled precariously around. The rush of blood darkens his eyes and widens his veins, a drumbeat of intoxication.

Eve’s head drops gently next to his feet, but it is too much effort to pull her round into his arms. He closes his eyes, barely breathing, and she touches his ankle.

Outside, the first stars prickle through the growing darkness.

\---

The bed is wide, and they are narrow. It is an ocean of space and texture; silk and linen and embroidered coverlet tumbled together, buoying them along.

Adam slides his arms around Eve, fitting his knees to the backs of hers, his chest to her gently curving spine. She catches his hands, pulls them against her chest.

He kisses the top of her shoulder, murmurs words into her skin.

“…da mi basia mille, deinde centum  
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum…”

Her hands squeeze his in appreciation.

“I never knew you approved of Catullus.”

He ducks his head and smiles, hiding it against her shoulder blade. “I don’t. You were translating his works, though. The other night. I remembered this one.”

“Mmm. Did you.”

Eve slides one hand down his side, over the sharpness of his hip, and pulls him flush against her. The room is stifling.

“What else do you remember?”

His hand finds her thigh in answer, caresses the length of it before pulling it back, across his own, and she drops her head back onto his shoulder with a shuddered breath.

Fingers grip sheets, and hips, and roam over the slope of belly and breast; neck and shoulder. The bed rocks with them, adrift in a sea of darkness; time stretches around them and fades into the distant tapestried walls, the invisible endless vastness of the world beyond.

They drift, in silence, the rush of blood in their ears like the tide.

“Do you still feel worn down, darling?”

Adam lifts his head from the pillow, eyes wide in the darkness. “How the fuck did you know that?”

Eve sighs through a smile. “Do you really need to ask? It’s been literal centuries; I know you better than I know myself. And I know your ennui.”

Adam blows out a rueful breath. “It’s the zombies; they get to me.”

She turns in his arms, raises herself on one elbow, and gently cups his cheek. He closes his eyes at her touch.

“Oh, my darling. It weighs on you, doesn’t it? We are an island, and the water rushes around us but does not change us.”

He snorts. Wrapping his hand around hers, he slides her palm to where he can kiss it.

“You make it sound so damned poetical.”

She arches an elegant brow. “Well, don’t blame me. You’re the one who dragged out poor Catullus.”

She settles down, tangling her feet with his and pressing their foreheads together. “But while we’re on the topic, you should remember your friend Henry. You know, the American? ‘For those who love, time is eternity’? It wouldn’t matter where or when we are, you know.”

“I know.”

He kisses her then, tenderly, and lets it linger.

Dawn is coming, a red sky with a clouded sun, and the ships are silent and still in the harbor, floating on a glassy sea. In a few hours, there will be people and voices and laughter; the tide is coming in. Time moves slowly in Tangiers, it always has. But it does move, and the rising sun leaves them behind.

**Author's Note:**

> I.  
> The theory of relativity states that measurements of various quantities are relative to the speed of the observer, resulting in dilation in space and time. 
> 
> \- Heavily paraphrased from _Relativity: The Special and General Theory,_ by Albert Einstein, published in 1916 and translated by Robert William Lawson
> 
> II.  
> “…da mi basia mille, deinde centum  
> dein mille altera, dein secunda centum…”
> 
> \- excerpt from _Poem V,_ by Gaius Valerius Catullus, Roman poet, 84-54 BC.  
>  There are many translations, and while it’s not one of the more exact ones, my favorite is the version by Richard Crashaw:
> 
> "Then let amorous kisses dwell  
> On our lips, begin and tell  
> A Thousand, and a Hundred, score  
> A Hundred, and a Thousand more..."
> 
> III.  
> “Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”
> 
> \- Henry Van Dyke, American poet, 1852-1933


End file.
